Further description: This Bible preserves the meaning, style, and words of the King James Version as far as possible while modernizing the language. Occasionally old words like “ye” and “thou” are left in. Verses that are in the KJV but left out in many modern versions have been included.

This translation was done using the e-Sword software as well as online dictionaries of the English language. Factors taken into account in the translation process were the definitions of words in the KJV as found in old dictionaries, the way in which words and expressions are used elsewhere in the KJV, the underlying Hebrew and Greek and their English translations, and the context of the passage.

Also, five Bible commentaries, those of Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Barnes, Wesley, Clarke, and Matthew Henry, as well as the 1599 Geneva Bible Translation Notes, were frequently consulted for insight into the meaning of the passage.

Atheists or Humanists have begun a Canada wide “bus slogan” campaign which touts the idea that there “probably” is no God. The bus slogan campaign first began in Great Britain and has now moved to Canada.

I had no idea that Atheists were so equivocal on this topic. But if you can’t state categorically that there is no God, what is the point? And, what are the ramifications for the person who “relaxes, and enjoys his life”- if in fact THERE IS a God? After all, “probably” isn’t a word likely to make many converts to their side.

Are Atheists “Atheists” not so much because they’re so sure that there is no God, but because they just want to stay home on Sundays and “enjoy life”?

Are they aware that Jesus said

“I came that you may have life–and to have it more abundantly”? John 10:10

Maybe Atheists believe that He probably didn’t say that.

If this campaign is “successful” which seems unlikely, maybe one of the drug companies will be inspired to present a similar “bus slogan” campaign; –”Abilify!, It probably won’t kill you”!

From Swiss Army knives to iPhones, it seems we just love fancy gadgets with as many different functions as possible. And judging from the ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism, the desire to impress with the latest multipurpose must-have item goes back at least 2000 years.

This mysterious box of tricks was a portable clockwork computer, dating from the first or second century BC. Operated by turning a handle on the side, it modelled the movements of the Sun, Moon and planets through the sky, sported a local calendar, star calendar and Moon-phase display, and could even predict eclipses and track the timing of the Olympic games.

I gave a talk on the device at London’s Royal Institution last night. One new clue I mentioned to the origin of the mechanism comes from the Olympiad dial – there are six sets of games named on the dial, five of which have been deciphered so far. Four of them, including the Olympics, were major games known across the Greek world. But the fifth, Naa, was much smaller, and would only have been of local interest.

The Naa games were held in Dodona in northwestern Greece, so Alexander Jones of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York has suggested that the mechanism must have been made by or for someone from that area.

What if; there were only lakes and seas before the flood? What if there were no “salt water” creatures prior to the flood? What if the oceans are the result of residual waters left over from the ‘fountains of the deep” bursting open and thus, are actually younger than some lakes?

In any case, it is not a problem for creationism–it is a problem for evolution theory…….s8int.com

Oldest Animal Fossils Found in Lakes, Not Oceans
By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience

Conventional wisdom has it that the first animals evolved in the ocean.

Now researchers studying ancient rock samples in South China have found that the first animal fossils are preserved in ancient lake deposits, not in marine sediments as commonly assumed.

These new findings not only raise questions as to where the earliest animals were living, but what factors drove animals to evolve in the first place.

For some 3 billion years, single-celled life forms such as bacteria dominated the planet. Then, roughly 600 million years ago, the first multi-cellular animals appeared on the scene, diversifying rapidly.

The oldest known animal fossils in the world are preserved in South China’s Doushantuo Formation. These fossil beds have no adult specimens â€” instead, many of the fossils appear to be microscopic embryos.

“Our first unusual finding in this region was the abundance of a clay mineral called smectite,” said researcher Tom Bristow, now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “In rocks of this age, smectite is normally transformed into other types of clay. The smectite in these South China rocks, however, underwent no such transformation and have a special chemistry that, for the smectite to form, requires specific conditions in the water â€” conditions commonly found in salty, alkaline lakes.”

The researchers collected hundreds of rock samples from several locations in South China. All their analyses suggest these rocks were not marine sediments.

“Moreover, we found smectite in only some locations in South China, and not uniformly as one would expect for marine deposits,” Bristow said. “Taken together, several lines of evidence indicated to us that these early animals lived in a lake environment.”

This discovery raises questions as to how and why animals appeared when they did.

“It is most unexpected that these first fossils do not come from marine sediments,” said researcher Martin Kennedy, a geologist at the University of California at Riverside.

“Lakes are typically short-lived features on the Earth’s surface, and they are not nearly as consistent environments as oceans are,” he explained. “So it’s surprising that the first evidence of animals we find is associated with lakes, which are far more variable environments than the ocean. You’d expect the first appearance of animals to be in the most conservative, stable environments we could imagine.”

It remains possible, Kennedy noted, that animal fossils of similar or older age exist that remain to be found that are marine in origin. However, at the very least, this work suggests “that animals had already taken on the ability to deal with the environmental fluctuations one sees in lake environments,” he said. “That suggests that their evolutionary response is much more rapid that I would have supposed, and that the earliest animals were far more diverse than imagined.”

If animals did first develop in lakes, one aspect of lake environments that could have spurred on their evolution is how much easier it is for air to percolate through them, given how much shallower they typically are than the ocean.

“The most popular explanation for the evolution of animals has to do with the increase in oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere at that time,” Kennedy told LiveScience. “It’s possible that lakes were the first to benefit from that increase in oxygen.”

The scientists detailed their findings online July 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Vinland Map first came to light in 1957 (three years before the discovery of the Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows in 1960) and was offered to Yale University by an alumnus, Laurence C. Witten II, an antiquarian book dealer. Unable to afford the asking price, and concerned that the dealer refused to reveal the provenance of the item, Yale contacted another alumnus, Paul Mellon, who agreed to buy it, and donate it to the university if it could be authenticated.

Recognizing its potential importance as the earliest map to show America, Mellon insisted that the authentication, conducted by two British Museum curators and a Yale librarian, be carried out in secret. This was to prove controversial, as the trio were unable to consult specialists.

After years of study, they decided the map was authentic; Mellon donated it to Yale, and it was revealed to the world in 1965, coinciding with the publication of the team’s research findings as an elegant book, The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation by Dr. Raleigh Ashlin Skelton, Thomas E Marston and George Painter. A year later, a Vinland Map Conference was held at the Smithsonian Institution, during which various significant questions were raised â€“ but the proceedings were not published for another five years.

In 1995, following years of debate and research, Yale released a second edition of its book, including new articles arguing that the map is authentic. In 1996, the map was valued at $25 million for insurance purposes.

Analyses of the map’s history and chemistry since 2003 have tended to argue against its authenticity, but at the International Conference on the History of Cartography in July 2009, Rene Larsen, rector of the School of Conservation at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, stated that “All the tests that we have done over the past five years â€” on the materials and other aspects â€” do not show any signs of forgery”. Some of his claims, as reported in the press, appear to ignore earlier studies.

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – The 15th century Vinland Map, the first known map to show part of America before explorer Christopher Columbus landed on the continent, is almost certainly genuine, a Danish expert said Friday.

Controversy has swirled around the map since it came to light in the 1950s, many scholars suspecting it was a hoax meant to prove that Vikings were the first Europeans to land in North America — a claim confirmed by a 1960 archaeological find.

Doubts about the map lingered even after the use of carbon dating as a way of establishing the age of an object.

“All the tests that we have done over the past five years — on the materials and other aspects — do not show any signs of forgery,” Rene Larsen, rector of the School of Conservation under the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, told Reuters.

He presented his team’s findings at an international cartographers’ conference in the Danish capital Friday.

The map shows both Greenland and a western Atlantic island “Vinilanda Insula,” the Vinland of the Icelandic sagas, now linked by scholars to Newfoundland where Norsemen under Leif Eriksson settled around AD 1000.

Larsen said his team carried out studies of the ink, writing, wormholes and parchment of the map, which is housed at Yale University in the United States.

He said wormholes, caused by wood beetles, were consistent with wormholes in the books with which the map was bound.

He said claims the ink was too recent because it contained a substance called anatase titanium dioxide could be rejected because medieval maps have been found with the same substance, which probably came from sand used to dry wet ink.

American scholars have carbon dated the map to about 1440, about 50 years before Columbus “discovered” the New World in 1492. Scholars believe it was produced for a 1440 church council at Basel, Switzerland.

The Vinland Map is not a “Viking map” and does not alter the historical understanding of who first sailed to North America. But if it is genuine, it shows that the New World was known not only to Norsemen but also to other Europeans at least half a century before Columbus’s voyage.

It was bought from a Swiss dealer by an American after the British Museum turned it down in 1957.
It was subsequently bought for Yale University by a wealthy Yale alumnus, Paul Mellon, and published with fanfare in 1965.

The lack of a provenance has caused much of the controversy. Where the map came from and how it came into the hands of the Swiss dealer after World War Two remain a mystery.

“This impressive portrait of a man is worked from the dark grey and very hard granite Diorit frequently used in Egypt. The back of the sculpture exhibits traits typical of Egyptian sculpture.

The clear, classically seeming structure of the frontally aligned head and the reserved arrangement of the face with simple linear and plastic elements correspond stylistically to works from the first century.

The portrait of a high-ranking Egyptian is from the last phase of the Greek rule in Egypt, beginning with the establishment of the Roman province by Augustus in the year 30.”

If what science tells us about man and dinosaur is correct, and they missed each other by millions of years, how and why did ancient man create images of the easily recognizable sauropod dinosaur, (among others,) often complete with the correct sauropod anatomical features and body shape, the correct skull/head shape and even a correct depiction of sauropod skin – which has only recently been discovered?

An ancient Chinese sauropod depiction features a long necked sauropod-like â€śdragonâ€ť eating a flower. Sauropods were vegetarians, but how did the ancients know?

A recent find, a Turkish ewer has a spout that is the spitting image of a brachiosaurs. Putting our little sauropod collection together in this little booklet, we believe helps us see how prevalent these depictions were in ancient art.

To living-pterosaur investigators and to those interested in live “pterodactyls”
**********************************CONTENTS
MonsterQuest “Flying Monsters” Broadcast
Scientific Paper Published (Whitcomb)
New Book Nearly Ready For Sale (Amazon.com)
**********************************MonsterQuest “Flying Monsters” on television

The June 3rd show on the History Channel was interesting to me: Never before had I watched four of my friends on television in one night. I was gratified: It introduced many American television viewers to the concept of living pterosaurs. But some things could have been better, for it seemed to emphasize standard-model dogma above eyewitness accounts.

Garth Guessman was a key expedition member with the MonsterQuest team. On New Britain Island, Papua New Guinea, they gathered what I believe was the largest group of natives ever to assist an expedition trek to seek a living pterosaur (here, it is not called “ropen”); even a child or two was carrying luggage. Garth stayed up the first night, while the MonsterQuest team members slept.

Unfortunately the one major sighting was that night, with Garth the only Western eyewitness. And that important sighting was not disclosed in the show.

For those who saw that show, I hope they’ll all eventually come to know details like this: The two camp fires observed far off, that first night (“unknown lights” that were discovered to be camp fires in the morning), were unrelated to the strange light that Garth had seen while the other explorers were
sleeping. That detail was left out of the show, with no hint that anything strange had been observed during the expedition.

Photo:Left to right: Whitcomb, Woetzel, Garthman and Paiva

In addition, this MonsterQuest episode put great stress on the idea that pterosaur sightings in Papau New Guinea may be from misidentifications of bats. That idea is now very outdated: Fruit-bat-explanation was long ago shot down.

The producers or writers appeared to have decided ahead of time that pterosaurs are extinct. The expedition to Papua New Guinea was for making an entertaining television show, not for making a serious scientific investigation.

Aside from those problems, there were a few brief interview clips favoring the idea of extant pterosaurs; this balanced the major opinion emphasized by the show: extinction. Nevertheless, they did show some balance.

To their credit, the show included bits of interviews with the explorers Garth Guessman and Paul Nation, and with the eyewitness Duane Hodgkinson and with the physicist Cliff Paiva. Without those four persons, the show would probably have been a sham; with them, it was fascinating.

I devoted six pages of my new book (in the appendix) to this MonserQuest episode. (“Live Pterosaurs in
America,” nonfiction – see the end of this newsletter)
**********************************

Scientific Paper Published in the CRSQ Journal
“Reports of Living Pterosaurs in the Southwest Pacific”

The Creation Research Society Quarterly, Volume 45, Number 3 (Winter 2009) included my article on apparent living Rhamphorhynchoid pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea. This is not the first time something on this subject has been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal; I know of one other paper written on this (by Mr. David Woetzel, in 2006: “The Fiery Flying Serpent”).

For those who have read the second edition of my book “Searching for Ropens,” my article gives few surprises. But it does include details not present in the book, in particular regarding Hodgkinson’s 1944 sighting. Also, there are several tables that allow quick referencing of sightings and expeditions (also not present in my book). Unfortunately, those who are not members of the Creation Research Society do not have access to most of the articles; but membership is not expensive.

Much shorter than my previous book (SFR), at 102 pages of content, it still packs many eyewitness accounts, the vast majority of which have never before been published. The approach differs from SFR, in that it is primarity a cryptozoological book rather than a spiritual-religious-cryptozoological one. Nevertheless, part of the appendix deals with the creationist aspects of the investigations, without which there would not have been any expeditions and therefore nobody who would have reported their eyewitness accounts to me.

In the last newsletter, many paragraphs described one aspect of the American eyewitness accounts regarding the elimination of the hoax-explanation. Since then, while continuing to write the book, I found two more aspects of the overall testimonies that disprove that a hoax or hoaxes played any significant part in those accounts. All three methods are explained in the book.

At $12.50, the nonfiction will be available on Amazon, but not on many other sites. It should be ready for ordering sometime between July 11th and August 7th, depending on potential last-minute correctioins [make that "corrections"].

The archive of the previous newsletter (014), Which includes “Elimination of Hoax-Explanation,” is found at: http://www.laattorneyvideo.com/nonlegal/pterosaurs/newsletters/014/
**********************************
Back issues of the first eight issues of this newsletter are at:

Photo: Mochica Culture vase replica and modern depictons of a pterosaur. Photo by Oscar Miranda.

Mochica Culture

Ancient Native American civilization on the coast of N Peru. Previously called Early Chimu (see Chimu), the Mochica were warriors with a highly developed social and political organization.

They built temples, pyramids, and aqueducts of adobe brick, were skilled in irrigation, and produced remarkable ceramics. In their stirrup jars, painted with scenes of everyday life, and their figure-modeled portrait jars they revealed fantasy and humor and achieved an astonishing fidelity to human forms.

The civilization, which began c.100 B.C., is believed to have lasted 1,000 years….Source: Answers.com

Birds Don’t Have Teeth

Modern birds are characterised by feathers, a beak with no teeth, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a lightweight but strong skeleton. All birds have forelimbs modified as wings and most can fly, with some exceptions including ratites, penguins, and a number of diverse endemic island species.

Birds also have unique digestive and respiratory systems that are highly adapted for flight. Some birds, especially corvids and parrots, are among the most intelligent animal species; a number of bird species have been observed manufacturing and using tools, and many social species exhibit cultural transmission of knowledge across generations….wikipedia

LIMA (Reuters) - A ceremonial plaza built 5,500 years ago has been discovered in Peru, and archeologists involved in the dig said on Monday carbon dating shows it is one of the oldest structures ever found in the Americas.

A team of Peruvian and German archeologists uncovered the circular plaza, which was hidden beneath another piece of architecture at the ruins known as Sechin Bajo, in Casma, 229 miles north of Lima, the capital. Friezes depicting a warrior with a knife and trophies were found near the plaza.

“It’s an impressive find; the scientific and archeology communities are very happy,” said Cesar Perez, the scientist at Peru’s National Institute of Culture who supervised the project. “This could redesign the history of the country.”

Prior to the discovery at Sechin Bajo, archeologists considered the ancient Peruvian citadel of Caral to be one of the oldest in the Western Hemisphere, at about 5,000 years.

Photo: Sechin Bajo

Scientists say Caral, located a few hours drive from Sechin Bajo, was one of six places in the world — along with Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India and Mesoamerica — where humans started living in cities about 5,000 years ago.

“The dating done by the German archeologists puts it at about 5,500 years,” Perez said of the plaza, which has a diameter of about 46 feet.

Earlier finds near Sechin Bajo had been dated at 3,600 years, and there may be other pieces of the citadel older than the plaza.

“We’ve found other pieces of architecture underneath the plaza that could be even older,” German Yenque, an archeologist at the dig site, told Reuters. “There are four or five plazas deeper down, which means the structure was rebuilt several times, perhaps every 100 to 300 years.”

Hundreds of archeological sites dot the country, and many of the ruined structures were built by cultures that preceded the powerful Incan empire, which reached its peak in the 16th century, just before Spanish conquerors arrived in what is now Peru.

There are so many archeological treasures that tomb robbing is a widespread problem in the Andean country.

Yenque said the scientists are filling in the site with dirt to preserve it and plan to resume excavation of the deeper floors when they get more grants to fund the project.

“We are lucky it was never destroyed by tomb robbers; that is why we are covering it up now,” Yenque said.

A team of archaeologists have discovered the ruins of the oldest known structures in Peru, erected 5,500 years ago, the Lima newspaper El Comercio reported.

The discovery is a sunken, circular plaza, situated in the coastal zone of Casma in the northern Ancash department, which according to 25 carbon-dating tests was first built around the year 3,500 BC. Nearly 2,000 years later, another structure measuring 180 by 120 metres was added onto it, the report said.

Peter Fuchs, director of the Sechin Bajo archaeological project, said the discovery appeared to confirm the first societies in what is now Peru with ceremonial centres in Casma, 300 kilometres north of Lima.

“Whoever built Sechin Bajo had advanced knowledge of architecture and construction. This is clearly seen in the handling given to the materials so that the buildings would be consistent,” Fuchs said. The prime material was stone transported from nearby hills.

The original plaza served for meetings and socialising, the scientists said. A second stage included adjacent buildings, and the final stage resulted in the largest structure with various patios, curved corners and niched walls.